Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation and California is in the Crosshairs

Innovators must be secure in their writing, research, and other innovation work. The institution of tenure was imported from Europe to the United States for the purpose of keeping boards of trustees and administrators from dismissing innovators out of hand if their findings did not toady up to prevailing opinion or if university donors found them offensive.

When professors are non-tenured (adjunct, contingent, transient, part-time, temporary), when they are completely off the tenure-track, they lack one or more or all of those things that generate innovation within Academe. After pulling myself up from the working class and marching through a grueling regimen lasting years of juggling numerous jobs and doctoral studies, I found American tenure nearly dead. I continued to work as a non-tenured professor, as I had sometimes done as a doctoral student. As a non-tenured professor, I often kept office hours with students out of the trunk of my car because I was not afforded adequate office space to meet with them. I usually had to buy my own teaching, research, and writing supplies. I spent a lot of time on the road traveling between two to three colleges and universities, teaching as many as seven courses a semester to make as much money as my tenure-track colleagues made in a month teaching two to three courses. I usually did not have health benefits. Sometimes my salary was held back for six to eight weeks from the onset of a term or semester before I could receive a check. I went hungry in lieu of the expense of gasoline to get to the teaching jobs.

Fortunately, I had had formal instruction in education. In order to offer my students quality of instruction, I adopted the teaching practices of Lev Vygotsky, a pedagogical innovator from Stalinist Russia, who dealt with overloads of students and few resources. Finally, on the verge of working my way into a more permanent position and a tenure-track opportunity, I was dismissed on a trumped-up accusation after making a comment that the president of the campus did not favor on the floor of the academic senate of a California State University campus, in the course of my duty as a faculty senator for my constituents. In the years following, as I sought justice in the matter, I was blacklisted from teaching in an attempt to shut me up.

I am telling you this story in order to paint the fine details of the picture of what it means to be non-tenured. Multiply my experience by many thousands of times. More than 70% of America’s professor-innovators are non-tenured. With the challenges facing the United States and the world that pose threats to civilization and the species, this is like sending troops into combat without body armor, bullets for their weapons, and the other things needed to win the day.

This is not the operational paradigm for the knowledge production machinery of a core society. This is the operational paradigm for a loser society. And, this is a root cause of why the United States is becoming a second-world nation.

The Great American Brain Drain

The United States must reconfigure how colleges and universities do business. An increasing number of graduate students from abroad who used to stay in the United States to employ their expertise after their graduate studies at American universities were completed are going back home to India, China, and other countries where they can make good livings and where the standards of living are increasing. An increasing number of foreign students look to their own countries or other lands than the United States to get their academic degrees.

In the meantime, American unemployment is rising and its standard of living is falling. What this means for American postsecondary students is, after they claw their way through one or more degrees, there is little skilled work to be had. Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher have joined the military forces at both enlisted and officer ranks to have work in the wars of the moment. It is either that or “flip hamburgers” in labor-intensive service industries. American companies enthusiastically contribute to the problem by shipping skilled jobs offshore where foreign workers can make a good living on lower salaries than Americans can in the United States. Worse still, American companies manage to import in droves of high tech labor. After the high tech laborers make a nest egg, they return to their country of origin where they open businesses and live well on less.

Can you hear it? That powerful sucking sound is the Great American Brain Drain. This is why China, India, and the offshore research and development (R&D) facilities of multinational companies are outpacing the United States in science and technology. And, this is why other societies will be at the core of the “big science, great policy” mitigations of global warming and natural disasters in an increasingly populated and infrastructure’d world on the decline side of oil.

Smarten Up America: Assemble the Knowledge Troops

The “big science, great policy” approach, that includes space-based mitigations, will require state and federal executives and legislators to reclaim their authority over the knowledge production machinery of American society. They must make sure America’s colleges and universities are in a condition to create knowledge and turn out knowledge workers to face the challenges of an Earth becoming more extreme. For, the kind of “first tier” knowledge needed to mitigate global warming, disasters, and the decline side of oil cannot be manufactured in the current sweatshops of American Academe that are so typified by the public state systems, like the gigantic California State University system.

It might take federal legislation like the Emergency Conservation Work Act of 1933 that launched the Civilian Conservation Corps to get America’s large armies of unemployed, under-employed, and overworked academic scholars, scientists, and engineers to work on the large-scale science and policy projects necessary for the survival of advanced industrial civilization and humanity. Where the Civilian Conservation Corps focused on putting the armies of unemployed young American men to work on decimated American forests, a science, knowledge, technology, and policy innovation corps could harness America’s unemployed and under-employed mature brain trust to work on and teach about global warming, the decline side of oil, disaster mitigation, long-duration spaceflight, and all the other things we hold as necessary and desirable for civilization and humanity to endure. Development of a large cadre of “knowledge troops” to engage these challenges would mean that there would have to be:

• Easy accessibility to every level of education, K-12 through postdoctoral opportunities for people of all ages

• Funds and resources to and state and federal oversight over American postsecondary institutions to hire into secure teaching and /or research positions the 70% or more of the American professoriate who are not now in secure positions -- and the unknown percentage who are actually unemployed

• Reduction in unemployment by purposefully hiring individuals into all sectors of the American work force that can address “big science, great policy” concerns

Rational social investment that meshes with “big science, great policy” concerns is how the United States and other societies can make it past the bottleneck between two epochs and succeed in the Anthropocene. Unless the United States takes action along these lines, it will not remain a “first world” core society for long.

This brings me to the end of Part III of “Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation.” In the final part, I discuss in more detail why Academe is the most important industry in California, the United States, and the world.

For part one of this series, click here.

Marilyn Dudley-Flores, Ph.D is a multidisciplinary scientist. She currently is the CEO of OPS-Alaska, (OPS: Oceanic, Polar, Space) a think tank based in Petaluma, where she manages projects over a range of disciplines. She frequently co-authors and speaks with OPS-Alaska’s Executive Director, Thomas Gangale, on a variety of topics including climate change and the need for social investment.